my 26th b-day, so how could it be bad?!?
strated the day at the El Encanto for champagne/cocaine brunch, where we "met" the jewler for the HA's over a snort in the bathroom; and went from there! perfect, warm day in Goleta, just up the road from SB, outdoors in a small football/track stadium. an all day affair. Elvin was great, with a sit-in from Jer. Zevon was hillarious! banging out his tunes, snarling at the crowd, and swigging from a bottle of Kamchatka vodka which he kept on the end of the piano. The bottle was 3/4 empty when he left; to later be brought back out to "apologize". I loved it!
The Dead rocked the place! Starting with the blasting of a Harley engine through the sound system, up until the very last tune! we were on the "stage right, so in front of Jerry. He was smiling, laughing, and having a great time, as was the rest of the band! the show ended and we all sumbled out onto the streets of Isla Vista as the sun set in the west....
Some say the show doesn't "listen" well; but if you were there, you know better! We were TOTALLY STOKED!

High energetic Grateful Dead performance, and very great audio sounding "Betty Board."

That's what the Space>NFA is, with one of Bob's biker drinking buddies charging his chopper up and down all their carpeted stage. They get into the song proper, and Donna's goin' for the gusto. Check out Bob playing the Nobody's Fault theme as a counterpoint. Donna stays super psyched to the end. Check out when Bob sings, "When the po-po-police knocked," and Donna responds (I think), "Spit it out, Bob!"

This whole show smokes from beginning to end. Sure it's a tiny bit sloppy at points, but it's sloppy fun. Of course, it's a 78, so it suffers from the Keith problem, but Jerry -- you can keep your Howlin' Wolf, he's got Wailin' Wolf! And he plays it to great effect throughout the show -- check out his solo on Looks Like Rain. Spectacular. Yes, Eyes is super fast, but I've heard it faster, and it's totally enjoyable.

All and all, this is a staight-up, cocaine-fueled rock show, with very little subtlety but a whole lot of frenetic energy.

Man - if I was Jerry I would have walked over and given Bobby and the Band a piece of my mind for interrupting his guitar playing crescendo on Estimated. What an awkward transition when Jerry was peaking!

Funny story about this show. My senior year at UCSB. A roommate worked at the Goleta Holiday Inn, where the band was staying. She slipped on something and cut her foot open. One of the band members felt sorry for her and gave her two backstage passes! We used the passes to bring a keg into the concert.

Amazing show. Really rivaled the Winterland concerts.

Jerry sat in with Elvin,Warren was good,however the crowd was there for one thing only at that point and Warren asked us if we were on valium.Right after his set Uncle Bobo reminded everyone where the first aid stations were.Cattle sounds as we were herded out.

Does Anybody Have The Elvin Bishop Show. I Was Told Jerry And The Guitarist From Wah Koo's Joined Them For The Encore. That Would Mean The First Jerry And Melvin Seals Performance ! Drop A Message,Contact Info,, I'll Check Back Periodically.

I've been to a couple hundred shows and this one is my favorite. The stadium was full with an awesome crowd. The energy that afternoon is something I will never forget. Those in attendance know they were at something very special.

I'm so glad to be hearing this amazing quality recording. For years I've only heard it on a cassette from an audience recording.

Hi There,

I'm in production on a Warren Zevon Documentary and looking for the audio from his opening set of this show. Please if anyone has it, send it my way, or let me know how to get it!

Thank you

If you were not there you cannot understand what went down.
Two Words - Ken Kesey,
Two More - Thunder Machine

There is a lot to like here, especially in the first set. "Eyes" is played at a frantic, breakneck pace which I find unpleasant and almost unlistenable.

It's a true gift that there are so many towering masterpieces in the band's career that this very enjoyable performance is, to my knowledge, barely a footnote.

They rock so hard on B.E. Woman
Perhaps as fierce as I have heard them on this tune. Almost hushed lullaby for Looks Like Rain.
How often did they close Set 1 with Jack Straw?
HALF A MILE FROM TUSCON
BY THE MORNING LIGHT!!! Yeah.
the banter is priceless for this show, not always easy to discern full gist -but band is so loose!!!
If you dance to the Grateful Dead
this a ghost dancing delight!
oh yeah the SAMSON is full tilt as well.
Band goes with ease from rocker to ballad
Great vocals by Garcia on Ship of Fools.
this show drips with emotion especially the vocals.
"You may think it is easy being a rock and roll star
but it requires INTENSE CONCENTRATION."
The Estimated Prophet is very strong. Weir even cuts off a jam but no matter it leaks back in and they proceed onward as Bobby renders vocals.
The EYES is very hot as well. Garcia is mulling the lyrics as he delivers them. and they jam it nice into an absolutely wicked Drums.( I am hearing like Snorting Hogs in there.)
While drifting into space I want to make a comment about the Grateful Dead and the meaning of life.. I will restrict this to band members but i believe it applies equally to heads as well. ----SHIT this is a crazy space... Is that Donna messing with my mind? Hear Jerry call for N.F.A.-I love when the drummers enter NOT FADE with the same lather as SAMSON...
Well back to the band. If you listen to Donna Jean from when she started with the band until this time -June 78. (whatever take a person might have on her skills,) she is to me fully and completely integrated into the band.
She is capable of hanging with the band on each and every tune and she can bring the rockers and the ballads. She was so badly needed at the 50th anniversary shows!
I love this N.F.A the motorcycle revving is like Weir hitting the whistle on Truckin or the train thing with Casey Jones in later years.
You know having TASTED of the Grateful Dead!--- I will always hold this music dear to me. And I am grateful to everyone who participated in and grooved with these tunes. First and foremost this a Fu@king Rock and Roll band and at times they may cause us to shake our heads but they always gave everyone the space to bring it as they saw fit, not always proper or polite but from the heart and the soul.
This show is just fantastic. The band does not play it safe, they go for it and they scream and they yell, and I love them for it.
GOING DOWN THE ROAD FEELING BAD...
A really nice Around and Around with Donna Jean encouraging Weir to spit out those "When the police knocked" lyrics out.
Having been to shows in a later era and having a sense of which shows I held nearest and dearest to me .I am fairly certain that this show would rate very high with anyone who got to shake their butt to this live.
We Never Stopped Rocking.
Light the fuse.
SUNSHINE DAYDREAM!
"We hope you have a long HOT summer"-Phil

If I had to choose, this would be the combo for a live show. Warren Zevon and the Dead....Obviously the fans were not aware of his talent at this point...Does anyone have copy of Zevon setlist? sick Jack Straw and Jerry wailing on Bertha

Great energy throughout the whole first set! Which is all I got to listen to, Jack Straw SMOKES!!!!!

Just from the simple fact that the band themselves were hooting gleefully in the middle of some of the first set tunes, expresses how wow this was even though the song list was generic!
Please bear with me! I have a lot of technical explantions that are important to understand which are not immediately obvious simply from listening to this, but if your patient you'll learn something and have a deeper apreciation of not only this but other shows as well!
Before we get to that let me say some notable things about the openers; I know I am heavily digressing here but hold on briefly: Despite Warren Zevon who was the last of three opening acts (Wa Koo and then Elvin Bishop) being drunk and and getting booed off! In all fairness Grateful Dead gave him a second chance to open in Tempe, Ariz. was it in '82 or 83? Where he redeemed himself, with just good music i.e. no accusing us in the crowd of "being possibly high on Qualudes" and "all 60's rejects" etc. God rest him, it sure shocked him when I saw him in the restroom backstage at an L.A. Sports Arena Pink Floyd show in '87 and told him I was at both this U.C.S.B. Grateful Dead show when I was a freshman in college, (actually I transferred to U.C.S.B. later as a junior), as well the Tempe show (Needless to say Bonnie Raitt was standing on the side of the stage and I hadn't yet back then seen her play live so I was eagerly hope she would come out but not with this fiasco with Zevon)!
Elvin Bishop on the other hand was in top form as reinforced very coolly by Jerry Garcia jioning him aalong the guitarist from this very interesting opening band "Wa-Koo"! What ever happened to them? Of course Elvin Bishop, was "Struttin' his stuff ya'll". But then he "Fooled around and fell in Love"!
Now back to the main event: If any of you attended the Greek in 87' where they were doin' the motorcycle thing! Well, this is were it was derived from! On that board tape one can clearly hear Mickey tell the biker not to rev. it up but to just let it idle unlike here; where this guy with the motorcycle obviously had a different approach!
For example, not only with the bike but with his monkey vocalizations too which he apparently couldn't hear himself with no monitor not realizing (and asking eventually though the mic, "Is this fuckin' thing workin'?") that it is going out over the P.A. before hand during the improvisational jam with Garcia doodlin' through his envelope filter (on by the way, the "wolf" Doug Irwin guitar i.e. the one in the movie since the Travis Bean had gotten stolen some time late the year before); (Wier unusually had a Ibanez double neck, and Lesh on the 10 button bass (Europe '72) but neither of them were in this jam until the motorcyle); while most interesting and rare Mickey Hart set some spooky Carribean rythmns using genuine steal drums! Not to mention some weird moaning and hollowing from Donna(? not visible or who knows maybe that was Bonnie Raitt or some other chick with the biker, in any case it made for a unique jam into the motorcycle charged Not Fade Away)!
Later I asked Mickey on his birthday in '83 Sun. 9-11 in Sante Fe, N.M. at the hotel about this. (How I came to be at the hotel : as a result of Southwest Airlines mistakenly sending my bags on to Dallas instead of Albuquerque when I was coming from L.A. and they also misplaced them on the way back too!) Anyway, they told me to go get them at the hotel where the band was staying at! So I asked him what ever became of the steel drums to which he replied that (being a bit tipsy, given that Weir had to help him walk on his birthday), "Oh, they are too delicate to take on tour". Yet Lo, and behold he brought them back out shortly thereafter at a few shows I saw, albeit only very briefly. (Like he said very delicate!
I once had two percussionists for roommates in graduate school who played steel drums; you see if they get ever so slightly bent they go out of tune! And one can't easily retune them as one can with a stringed instrument. Instead it takes a lot of careful beating of the metal into just the correct size of the bowl shapes which form each note)! After this he opted instead from then on, to derive that and other sounds he fancied at any given show from the electronicly synthesized drums which obviously by that time had finally achieved a more reasonable state technological funtionality (at reasonable prize of course)!
Unlike when this U.C.S.B. concert occurred, when obviously the state of the art for synthesized musical sounds beyond that of single note keyboards i.e. one couldn't in those days play a chord though with a synthesizer (with the exception that is, of Keith Emerson). Such that at the previous year's opening show Sat. 2-26 where they debuted "Estimated Prophet" in San Bernardino they had to plug Garcia into (on, by the way, the white Travis Bean, which had an aluminum neck, which also by the way, the only other famous guitarist to use one of these was in that same year '77, namely Greg Lake, since I saw E.L.P. play that year as well), so that Jerry could get the proper envelope filter sound, a Moog that Godchaux was, needless to say, very reluctant to play since he only like piano! (Listen to for example, the tape of Dallas in '77 where Keith very breifly plays a synthesizer on the beginning of "Playin' in the Band" and then suddenly he just stops playing keyboard all together at least, if I recall correctly, until they do another tune); (unlike Brent Mydland of course)!
Until later of course as you well know, when they finally figured out how to achieve this for Garcia, not only for "Estimated Prophet"'s envelope filter sound independently, (and others tunes again as you well know such as "Fire On The Mountain" and so on), without having to plug him into a keyboard! But additionally also, for his guitar synthsizer sounds in the '90s etc. and Weir, and Lesh, and as I already said the drummers too!
This is as opposed to, a comment in an interview in '79 in B.A.M.(Bay Area Music) magazine with Billy K. where he made reference to this, saying something to the effect of that he felt (at that time which is the key point here) that synthesized percussion was not satisfactory (as of yet)! And as I implied above, even Jerry's envelope filter in '78 was still a relatively new gadget being used first both the day before, as well as for "Samson& Delilah" and "Dancin' in the Streets" (disco arrangement) the next day at my first show when they opened up '76 for the Who at Oakland Stadium on Sat.-Sun. Oct. 9-10!
Despite Bob apologizing for being "Horribly out of tune" after the openers "Bertha"->"Good Lovin'"; this show really cooks!

Augy
San Diego

This was my 2nd show. I drove up with an older buddy of mine, Scott Mad Man, me 17. He and his friends had lived and/or attended UCSB, Isle Vista. I lied to my folks, said we were going to visit the campus. Well, that was the education I needed. I felt a high energy crowd dew to the amount of blow flowing in the crowd and among my friends. I was calling songs like crazy, couldn't miss. I'm usually not a big TJ fan, but this version rocks. Late 70's DEAD rocks!

...drove all night in Johnny A's red Ford Econoline from Santa Cruz arriving just as the sun glazed the ocean in front of the Biltmore where we booked a cabana for the day. nice place I'm thinking.. and hey...Paul Newman in the shack next door!But I got a show to tape.It being 9 in the morning we hussle our shit into the room and get our asses over to the field so we can get up real close to tape our first Dead show ever. (I taped a few Jerry shows at the Keystones but this was big time!!Really had no freakin' clue what we were doing.I found a 6 foot bamboo stick on the beach to tape our $50 sony "stereo" mic to. The deck we had was a "state of the art" $200 beauty if ya know what I'm saying. A real P O S. They let us in at noon and we staked out a spot smack in front of Jerry's stuff.I was amazed at the stage and the elaborate wrapping that was created for this show.Find a picture! Heard this new phenom, friend of Jackson Browne was opening up. Oh well, how bad could it be.The bottle of Tanqueray on the piano should have been a hint.I remember Phil sneaking a peak between the monitors shaking his head as Zevon wailed away like a boozed up rookie.weird shit to start the festivities. Anyway.. out comes the band. we roll the tape. I got this stupid pole in Jerrys face.Way too close...Duh! Yeah I'm a big bad taper now. Boomers kick in and I'm a goner!!! To hear that very recording today is an emotional trip every time. I can hear me dancing! It's not live...it's alive!

I love this show. I rate it my favorite one attended as I still got the poster from it.
But my point of this post is to discuss the drugs the band had taken for the day. I read that some though maybe they were drunk but this would have been a very sloppy show if they were drunk. Coke was also mentioned but that wares off pretty quickly, like maybe you get a good buzz for 30 minutes then you spend the rest of the day chasing that high, but you never feel it again. I'm guessing MDMA, also know as Ecstasy. This was just coming out in the late '70's. Side effects of the drug: Ecstasy produces stimulant effects such as an enhanced sense of pleasure and self-confidence and increased energy. Tell me that doesn't sound like this show?

A very strong performance, this show also showcases and to an extent epitomizes the approach of the Dead during the coke laden Spring and Summer tours of 78, which was taking songs to the rock extreme, dismissing subtlety and often groove, to instead pummel you with power strumming and giddy singing and some growling too...Jack Straw and NFA being 2 prime examples...if this appeals to you, then you will love this show, but 73 it ain't...very good sbd, pretty balanced, overall this show does rock...I rate only against other 78 shows and its a 4.5, the second Red Rocks show 07-08 is a five...

This show is what makes one a deadhead, and makes one want to listen to every show

jangly and sung out of tune. A bad Donna night. Hope her hair looked real good.

...sounds like it during NFA.

They were a rock n roll band now weren't they! Holy smokes that was a HOT show.

Great recording too. Thanks to all those whoe have helped preserve and make available this and so many other great moments in GD history. Bless you all!

great show !!

Many attendees of this show recall the craziness that surrounded Warren Zevon's set. Well I have a very nice audience recording of it, and I'd like to share a few comments!!

Number one, Zevon was definitely flying on something the entire set. Therefore he is loud and obnoxious to the audience. Number two, the set goes on a little too long and it's obvious that the crowd is getting bored. You can hear people in the audience yelling "Bring on the Dead!!" The chants get louder as the set wears on.

Before he goes into "Werewolves of London," Zevon says to the restless crowd: "Okay you fuckin' acid casualties... you vegetables... I want you to say "AAAOOOHHH!" (The crowd either yells "AAAOOOHH" or starts to boo!) "Now, you ne'er do wells....I'm going to introduce one of the greatest living singers to you... you don't deserve it but you got it!" (He introduces Bonnie Raitt, who gets a decent round of applause) "Say AAAOOOHHH!!!" (more catcalls and boos from the audience!!! "Bring on the Dead" chant grows louder and louder) "Just turn in all your drugs to my road manager and we'll see that they are properly disposed of." (More booing and catcalls as Zevon & band starts the song.)

Zevon does finish his set, which ends under an assault of feedback. (Very little applause from the audience). Bill Graham, the master of ceremonies gets on stage and says "Once again, please Warren Zevon..... (Zevon says 'thank you')
We will be back in a little while with the... Grateful Dead." And the crowd cheers wildly.

Warren Zevon setlist:

VERACRUZ
JOHNNY STRIKES UP THE BAND
TENDERNESS ON THE BLOCK
MOHAMMED'S RADIO
EXCITABLE BOY
ACCIDENTALLY LIKE A MARTYR
NIGHT TIME IN THE SWITCHING YARD
A CERTAIN GIRL
ROLAND THE HEADLESS THOMPSON GUNNER
POOR PITIFUL ME
WEREWOLVES OF LONDON
LAWYERS, GUNS & MONEY

at the worst this show is a 4 star... around and around isn't what he deemed it as... 1978 is a great year for both jerr's last year he would have the same voice before blowing it for good.

late donna and keith, always a fan of.
i say a 5 star show and i wasnt even born yet.

This show has some highlights, but is there anything worse when Bob Weir starts SCREAMING into the mic, like he does on Around and Round, and Not fade away. like one reviewer said, at the time, if you were there it would have been ok, but with repeated listens it gets painful. Still, its hard for me to be critical of any Dead shows because there are so many good ones available.

Perfect sound. Someone gave this 1 star!!!!!!!!

I just wrote on the FaceBook wall of Gary Louris (the Jayhawks; Golden Smog; Gary Louris) that I have been listening to Grateful Dead shows '72 - '80 and Exile on Mainstreet and Rusted Root's Stereo Rodeo and some of his albums (Hollywood Townhall and Down by the Old Mainstream) --- Henceforth, I have this specific sound/vibe/energy/lifestyle/recording I am looking for and like listening to right now especially in the age of "auto-tone" and so, yeah, this definitely qualifies ... This show is totally awesome.

Best of the Roses, John French
www.mystrawhat.com & http://theneweverydaymedia.blogspot.com

this show rocks hard, just finished with tenn jed and the jam is incredible, looks like rain was great, in fact everything so far has been rocking and the rest of the show only promises more!

If you end up enjoying this, cool, but, honestly:

Set 1 has some truly great moments...but...

Set 2 degenerates into something really bad, starts off well but gradually goes south. It really seems that the band got drunk backstage. Yes, they are pumping out unbridled energy, hooting and hollering by the end (which seems to convince many that the music is great), but the playing becomes just a mess, amateurish. They are certainly pleased with themselves, but very likely upon listening back, they would feel that they'd like to forget about this one, embarrassed by it.

Again, for those that enjoy this show, great. But, honestly the 2nd set is truly progressively bad. There are so very many other better shows. It's worth it to skip this one (or at least sign off a few songs into set 2).

Monster of a show. A C Miller remaster of a Betty board equals perfect sound.

Good Show. GREAT SOF but I think you can hear the cocaine a little more than the music during NFA>GDTRFB>Around ...a little sloppy at times and a bit over the top with the raucous screaming.

This is BADASS!

Best recording of a very powerful 1978 monster.

If you like your Dead raw, rough, and hard rocking, this show is for you.

Ripping versions of BERTHA, BEW, JACK STRAW, and UNCLE>RIVER in set one, then killer ESTIMATED.EYES in set 2...with the wildest, craziest stuff post-drums....NFA comes with motorcycle revs, GDTRFB charges out like a beast, and even the R&Round is outta control. Double encore of an equally romping US Blues>Mag to finish.

Sound: 5.0
Show: Easy 4.5